Gamifying History Using Beacons and Mobile Technologies

Abstract

This project focuses around incorporating multiple elements of gamification (Kapp Few Ideas 13, 2014 [1]) within the capital city of Malta. Often, tourists, or even natives, find it tough to become knowledgeable about a city’s history. However, through the implementation of games, anything could be learned much more easily! By using transmitters (Gomez et al. Sensors 12(9):11734–11753, 2012 [2]) scattered around the city, every corner is transformed into an intractable entity. Through an application developed solely for smartphones, players join together to embark themselves on an exciting adventure which takes them around the city. The application consists of a single role-playing game, which introduces interactions with various parts of Valletta, along with some lesser known history facts. Unknowingly, players would be digesting information about the city while both having fun and competing with others. The game is developed specifically in a way to encourage knowledge gathering and understanding. As the player evolves within the game, more knowledge is absorbed through quests. In this virtual world, the player is able to live life as it in was in the past, replicating any skill capable of being done in the real world. Players get stronger as they complete quests and roam around the capital city, slaying monsters that have broken free, and training by themselves. Experience and in-game value are given to players as they level up through the game. More knowledge is gathered, as players unravel the history of the city of Valletta. The main objective, therefore, will be to encourage and lessen the struggle required to learn massive chunks of information. By including a whole virtual world, players synchronize their knowledge gain with their playing experience (Childress and Braswell Dist Educ 27(2), 187–196, [3]). This will require a rich system with all the features possible to make player engaging even easier.